


the burning season

by sevenfoxes



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Cousin Incest, Dustbowl AU, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Minor Arya Stark/Gendry Waters, Okay mostly just them being ranchers and roughnecks, Referenced Lyanna Stark/Rhaegar Targaryen - Freeform, Slightly Darker Jon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 20:37:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: He comes home and Sansa is exactly as Bran had written: different. She’d been quiet growing up, at least to Jon, but the stony, steel-spined woman who lets him hug her on the dusty porch and whisper out his guilt into her skin is leagues away from the girl he left behind.The girl he left behind to keep safe.(Those Targaryens.  They’ll bite down until they taste blood.)When they were younger, she’d always looked at him like he was a betrayal. To what, Jon was never sure. Her mother, who loathed Jon as evidence that her husband was a flawed, mortal man. Her father, whose honour outside of Jon’s existence was beyond reproach. Her siblings, who all treated him as the brother that Sansa never did.Now she looks at him like the betrayed. “Welcome home,” she says with a brittle voice, but she touches the scar that runs through his eyebrow, a gift from the oil fields.





	the burning season

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the dry season](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11815839) by [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily). 



> You don't need to read [the dry season](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11815839) to read this, but I HIGHLY recommend reading it because it's great. If you haven't, a synopsis of how this fits in:  
> 1) This is set in the 1930s Dustbowl Era Texas, but hello to all the GoT names for places. Just go with it.  
> 2) Lannisters run the banks, Targaryens run the oil fields. They fight over other industries.  
> 3) Jon runs off and works as a roughneck in the oil fields after Ned drops the Rhaegar bomb. Also because of Sansa.  
> 4) Ned Stark gets dead, as do Robb, Catelyn and Rickon. Sansa is kidnapped by the Boltons and sold to Littlefinger’s brothel. Brienne brings her home.  
> 5) Arya’s a little hellcat who goes missing only to come back and bone Gendry.  
> 6) Ygritte works at the racetrack as a jockey and has a thing with Jon when he comes back. She also gets dead.
> 
> This is… I don’t know, it’s not really a sequel or sitting exactly in that same universe (although it’s mostly compliant). It’s more like a riff. I just wanted to explore the dirty-wrong-badness tension between Jon and Sansa.

 

 

 

 

It’s Mormont who finds him on the well six hours into his shift, Jon’s hands caked with oil-soaked dirt that he can never quite get out from under his fingernails.

“Your father’s dead,” Mormont says in the breakroom, the other men ushered out into the blinding sunshine. “Mam, too,” he adds, even though Catelyn Stark had never been anything close to resembling a mother to him.

Jon has never heard Mormont’s voice ever go soft before; he’s been a roughneck under the Targaryens - under his _real_ father’s family - for nearly his entire life. But Jon Snow is another grunt, another man looking to make his fortune on the black blood they keep pumping from the earth. None of the men he works with know that half his own blood comes from the giant dragon shaped like a T stamped on the side of the well, etched into the tools the men use, that Jon uses.

No one really knows, just a few people at a dusty farm Jon fled coming up on five years ago.

This far west, news travels real slow, and by the time Jon makes it to the station to send a letter to the Stark farm, nearly two days have passed. In the station, there’s a sketch of Ned Stark’s face, a description of a murder with REWARD FOR INFORMATION! in large caps along the bottom of the paper.

Ned Stark died more than a year ago.

Jon didn’t know. He wasn’t there.

It takes three more weeks and a letter from Bran to learn Robb and Rickon were dead too, Arya missing, and Sansa kidnapped. Arya is still gone, but Sansa returned nearly a month previous, Bran writes.

 _She’s not the same anymore_ , the letter says.

 

\--

 

The problem had been that it had started far earlier than the night Ned Stark sat a twenty year old Jon down to talk about Ned’s sister. About how she’d run off with a man whose family owned nearly half the state, that had a wife and babes of his own waiting at home for him.

Took her near a year to catch on that the man who had taken her to a sprawling house near the Gulf was after more than just love, that his rich promises to get between her legs were hollow. That his wife was barren, but he wanted more fruit. That what had started off as freedom, as passion, had devolved into another man who wanted to own her.

Targaryens’ madness and brilliance burn in equal measure.

Lyanna had left him in the middle of the night, run as far as she could and got halfway home before needing the birthing bed. That’s where Ned had found her: a small home for unwed mothers run by the Silent Sisters, a babe at her breast as birthing fever took her last breath.

( _She begged me_ , Ned told him. _She begged me before she died not to let him take you. If he’d known you were his, he would have brought you back to that place. Lyanna never wanted you to have any part of that family._ )

The problem was that he’d been looking at his sister like something more than that long before Ned had made her a cousin. That she’d started looking back. That he’d stare at her outside, leaning back against the tree in shorts sheared too high from longer pants that had frayed at the cuffs, that her mother had hemmed up because the Starks didn’t waste.

That while Sansa didn’t have a kind word for him, not in earshot of her mother, she’d let her knees fall apart when she’d catch him staring. That she’d drop a hand to touch the unblemished, pale skin of her inner thigh and stare right back in challenge.

He'd left after that night in the kitchen, packed his bags and slipped out the door while Sansa slept upstairs, his fingerprints on the fleshy yield of her thighs and the stain of their trespass over the both of them.

Ned's lies had just been yet another reason to run. Not the only.

 

\--

 

Jon had found her tombstone before leaving town. It was easy to find in the crowd of cheap weathered crosses and crudely carved rectangles; it was cut from beautiful marble, extravagantly expensive.

 

LYANNA STARK  
1891 - 1908  
HONOURED DAUGHTER OF GOD

AEMON STARK  
1908 - 1908  
BELOVED BABY BOY

 

Rhaegar had paid for it. Ned had forced the mason to change the order from _Aemon Targaryen_ at the end of a gun when words hadn’t sufficed, though the given name alone was enough to give away the parentage. The Starks didn’t need that kind of trouble, not when Lyanna had left a jilted fiance with a powerful name behind.

Not when the Targaryens were known for burning people down in their homes, for a ruthlessness that let them conquer so much of the West. Not when Rhaegar’s wife Elia had taken her own life, taken the children with her, and left behind a vengeful family of her own.

No, they didn’t need that kind of trouble.

Rhaegar had never bothered digging up the grave. to confirm Ned’s story He’d been too consumed with grief. If he had, there would’ve been only one set of bones inside.

Just one.

 

\--

 

 _I’d have written you, but we didn’t know where you were_ , Bran writes. _Robb tried to find you._

Bran’s handwriting has not improved much with age, though he’d been so young when Jon left that he has a hard time imaging the boy as the near-man he’d be now.

_Please come home. We need you._

They never tell you that guilt is what always kills you in the end.

 

\--

 

He comes home and Sansa is exactly as Bran had written: different. She’d been quiet growing up, at least to Jon, but the stony, steel-spined woman who lets him hug her on the dusty porch and whisper out his guilt into her skin is leagues away from the girl he left behind.

The girl he left behind to keep safe.

( _Those Targaryens.  They’ll bite down until they taste blood._ )

When they were younger, she’d always looked at him like he was a betrayal. To what, Jon was never sure. Her mother, who loathed Jon as evidence that her husband was a flawed, mortal man. Her father, whose honour outside of Jon’s existence was beyond reproach. Her siblings, who all treated him as the brother that Sansa never did.

Now she looks at him like the betrayed. “Welcome home,” she says with a brittle voice, but she touches the scar that runs through his eyebrow, a gift from the oil fields.

If Sansa is different, the Arya he comes to - the one who arrived only a week before he does - is downright foreign. The wildness has been warped by anger, by a list of people who have wronged their family. She doesn’t ask him where he’s been, just peers at him through knowing eyes far too old for her still child-like face.

Later, when he’s had his fill of beans cooked in maple fat and conversation with his only brother that lives, Bran tells him to take Sansa’s room. Formerly her parents’ room, it’s the only one that has a bed other than Arya and Bran’s, the rest destroyed when the Boltons came calling. When Jon flinches and asks after Sansa, where she sleeps, Bran simply says, “She doesn’t.”

Which Jon comes to discover isn’t entirely true, but close enough. When Jon arrives home late from the night shift at the well, she’s almost always up, coffee in her hand, one of the only extravagances they can afford other than the cheap fresh produce they buy at the Cassel’s dusty store. She sits up and watches the horizon past the barn that houses one bone-thin horse that Sansa had ridden as a young girl and a handful of chickens.

Sometimes he sits up with her, tells her stories about the wells. There aren’t many happy tales from them, but she doesn’t flinch at the story about the time Pyp forgot to check the pressure valve and lost a thumb, or when Sam nearly drowned in oil when the one out near Riverrun burst.

(He doesn’t tell her that was the day he nearly died, how the oil sparked up, but he didn’t burn.)

Sansa doesn’t tell her own stories, but she asks about his. She asks questions about things she has no right to know, that the younger version of herself, the one that blushed as Jon’s wandering eye, would never ask. She asks about Ygritte, what Jon does with her on the porch she shares with a man Jon is almost positive is her husband. Sansa asks and he answers in blistering detail, like each touch with Ygritte is something that keeps them both safe from each other.

But some nights when he comes home she’s asleep, upright in the kitchen chair, her chin tucked against her shoulder, her body losing the war with unconsciousness.

Those nights, he takes the shotgun he normally pretends not to see propped against the leg of her chair and spreads it across his lap. He takes the night’s watch from her and prays to the marrow of his bones that Ramsay Bolton takes a step onto their land again.

 

\--

 

Ygritte was a good woman.

She was a good woman who let Jon between her legs, let him hold down her wrists and kiss her sweet mouth. Let him disappear inside of her, if only for a while. She was a good woman, but she was never his.

But she made it safe. Loving her made it safe for him to share a roof with another girl kissed by fire that he could not touch. Ygritte was never his, but he could be hers. She could leave fingernail marks furrowed into his back to remind him of her claim, bruises from her hands and her mouth, words that lingered inside of his head like flesh branded. But she always went home to another, and the marks from her hands faded same as the ones he left on her. Healed up until there was nothing left.

Funny how he always wanted to be owned by women who refused to keep him.

Ygritte rode a horse like a bandit, took pride in what she did. Never took a bribe, not like half the jockeys at King’s Landing, pulling up their horses short to line the Lannister pockets.

And they killed her for it.

Now, nowhere is safe.

 

\--

 

There’s money in his name. There’s money in his name, and they need the money. The interest payments on the farm alone are close to eating up what Jon makes at the well, even though Arya refuses to take it. He starts sending most of his pay directly to the bank after Arya tosses the folded bills back in his face when he stuffs them in her palm.

(Like his money isn’t good enough, like he doesn’t have any right to the house under his feet. He knows that’s not it, that it’s more about the growing war Arya has with the Lannisters, but old wounds heal slow, and sometimes he likes to poke at the still-blistered skin. _You’ll never be one of them._ )

Growing up, he’d always wanted to be a Stark. They weren’t rich, but they were respected, and respect carries a weight in the badlands that money doesn’t even begin to touch. Mostly though, he’d wanted to be acknowledged by his father, even though Ned had denied him none of the love he bore Robb or any of his trueborn siblings. It was different though, being loved enough to be given a name.

Sitting in that room, Ned telling him the name owed to him was not Stark but rather Targaryen, Jon had vowed to take neither.

(Ned had given Lyanna’s son the Stark name, etched in marble, but Jon is not that dead boy.)

But now, there’s money in his name. Rhaegar never had another child after Lyanna passed, and none of his siblings had managed to bear fruit either, though Rhaegar’s sister is nearly Jon’s own age. But rumour has it she lost one real young, that her body’s not built for bearing heirs, and that the Targaryen line is coming to an end.

There’s enough money that if he claimed the name, they’d never have to worry about it again. They’d never have to scrape together coins to put dried beans, potatoes, and wilted lettuce onto the table, never worry about the lawmen coming to the house to evict them. Jon could protect the last pieces of his family the way he should’ve from the start, too blinded by his pride and wounded by his hurt.

Jon makes the mistake of mentioning it after one too many shots of whiskey that Arya poached from the shitty bar he keeps warning her off from patroning, mostly to grift stupid roughnecks like Jon out of their weekly pay.

“Don’t be stupid,” Arya says brusquely, throwing back another shot. Her dark hair shifts enough that Jon is able to see the line of marks on her throat she tries to keep hidden, bruised flesh from a mouth that makes Jon’s last remaining brotherly tendencies rise. “I heard there’s trouble brewin’ with the Targs anyway.”

“Trouble?”

“Gendry’s got a couple hands on the ranch that came north from the fields. Word is the girl’s making a move on Rhaegar’s share now that their brother’s dead. Seeing as he ain’t right in the head.”

They say Rhaegar’s touched with the same madness that ate at his father late in life, that the loss of his children turned his mind dark. They say Rhaegar burned his own father down when the rumours reached his ear. _Killed that girl Rhaegar ran off with and got with child. A bastard challenger to his empire, a threat to his partnership with the Martells. Heard Aerys paid a lot of coin to make his son’s mistake disappear._

No, the Starks don’t need that kind of trouble.

He’ll take Snow to his grave, his second tombstone not nearly pretty as his first.

 

\--

 

Ygritte’s been gone a little over two months when the waters she’d been holding back break.

Jon had stopped by the Cassels’ store on the way back home, open late to service the men flooding into town for the new set of wells they’re putting up near the western border. Late shifts mean all the businesses are adapting, a town normally dark by nine suddenly lit into the wee hours. Beth had flirted shamelessly, as she always did, batting her eyes and offering to show Jon around town even though he’d grown up in the damn place, been back for nearly a year on top of that.

But she’d offered him an apple - _real cheap, gonna go bad and the rest are gone, no one wants only one_ \- and he’d let his finger brush hers as he took it, smiled and nodded and did what it took to walk out the door with an extra fifty cents in his pocket.

He hands Sansa the apple and watches the corners of her mouth pull up into the first semblance of a real smile he’s seen since he’s been home. Sansa doesn’t need to tell him that this is the first apple she’s held in a long while. The crop up north last year was blighted, and they haven’t been able to afford them since. Even in the oil fields, men’s pockets a bit heavier, apples were hard to come by. Truth be told, Jon can’t really afford this one either.

But it’s worth it to see something warm on her face again.

Cutting the apple into slices with the sharp knife she keeps on the table next to the salt shaker, she eats quiet and thoughtfully. Jon waves her off when she offers him a slice, happier to watch her eat than he would be to taste.

But when she kisses him after, by the sink where she’d been cleaning the knife until he strode up behind her, she tastes just like that apple. The sweetest goddamn thing he’s ever tasted in his life.

He runs his tongue along her bottom lip like that first night and listens as she makes the same noise she did then, too. A breathy sigh that sends a shiver up his spine like he touched a wire he shouldn’t have. He lets his fingers slide into her hair as she tilts her head, deepening the kiss until the wet sounds of their mouths meeting is obscene in the poorly-lit kitchen, drowning out the angry crickets outside.

Her moves are bold, more practiced than the coltish, jerky way she’d kissed back the first time. Somewhere, she has learned how to kiss.

Jon breaks first, drawing away.

“It’s not right, me wantin’ you,” Jon says because he’s long been schooled in the wrong things to say at the worst possible times. There’s something inside of him, something he’s tried to kill since he left Winterfell, the part of himself that truly is Ned’s son. The part of himself that sees Sansa and knows his baseborn feelings for her are wrong, that they would have broken Ned’s heart if someone hadn’t shoved a knife into it first.

It’s the only part keeping him from bearing her back onto the floor and pushing up her skirts.

But Sansa jerks back this time, though his hands and the counter at her back make her retreat only far enough to give them a polite distance between their faces, their hips still bound together.

“It’s not right that father died alone. It’s not right that Mother and Robb died with their throats cut nearly through. It’s not right that Rickon died where you’re standing, barely nine. It’s not right that I had to do what I did to get home,” Sansa says, bitterness saturating her voice. Sansa’s never spoken of where she was taken, what happened to her during the months she was gone, so Jon’s imagination has filled the space, littered with horrors her words are only confirming. _Somewhere, she learned how to kiss_. “God, what a burden it must be, bein’ the only right man in a world of wrong.”

Jon doesn’t have much of an answer for that. The world isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and once upon a time, he’d thought he could do something right, at least for her.

“You left,” she accuses, and the weight of her voice knows this fight’s been six years coming.

“I had to.”

“Horseshit,” Sansa says. “Don’t dress your cowardice in self-sacrifice. You didn’t need to leave like that.”

“You think I don’t know I should’ve been here? I know I should’ve. If I hadn’t have left--”

“You’d be dead alongside Robb. Or Rickon.” Sansa looks pained as she speaks, like she’s giving life to her fears. He recognizes the sound of it in her voice. “All our misfortunes aren’t yours to claim, Jon. You only get to blame yourself for the things that are your fault.” Her eyes shift downward, onto the floor marked with the dirty prints of his boots. To the spot where his knees had ached for her, her skin bruised for him. “You should’ve at least told me you were leaving. Doin’ that then letting me wake to find your room empty. You fucker.”

She doesn’t understand.

“Should I have told Father I wanted to bed his daughter?” he says more to shock her than anything else, to give her a glimpse of his mind the night he left. He hasn’t called Ned Father for years, and they both know it. “Should I have told him that I disgraced his eldest girl in his own home? Should have I told Robb what I wanted to do to his sister? That I wanted to do before I knew the truth, when you were still a sister to me too? Should I have told them that, Sansa?”

(It had been Ned’s revelation that had made the hurt even worse. _Targaryens burn dark; they ain’t above looking at their own kin_. He’d listened to Ned speak of his father and thought of Sansa, about the thoughts he’d carried for her for years even though he knew it to be a grave sin.)

If he was aiming for shock, he fails miserably. Her face is flat and serious as she says, “Yes,” and he knows she’s saying it to goad him, so he gives in.

“And Catelyn?”

That lands high and fatal, her face letting him know instantly that he’s hurt her in his quest to feel right about his wrong choices. Sansa had carried her mother’s honour like it was her own, felt her pains and joys; she’s always been in her mother’s pocket on all things, even on the offense of Jon’s existence, his continued presence in their home.

(It had been the year she turned fourteen that things had changed, when she’d hit that growth spurt that had her near as tall as he was, growing curves and the attitude of a woman grown. When he caught her looking back, testing him as though he was a bad habit she was toying with picking up.)

Shortly after speaking with Jon, Ned had confessed to his wife, told her the embarrassment and betrayal she’d carried for twenty years had been another man’s shame. When Jon left, Ned was still bunking down with Rickon, banished from his marital bed.

Jon never asked if Ned found his way back to Catelyn’s good graces before he died.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, truly repentant.

“I don’t want your apologies.”

“What do you want?”

Sansa - even the young, demanding girl he left behind and lost - has always been a creature to guard herself. When she was younger, it was from the appearance of impropriety, from the whispers of the women in church with faded hats, eligible sons, and sharp tongues. Now, there’s a feral quality to her protectiveness, like each secret is a plate of metal making a suit of armor, like the last thing she fears is a reputation.

So when she says, “To feel safe again,” like the words are being carved out her chest with a knife, bloody and raw, he knows she’s conceding defeat to share the truth. “You can’t give that to me. No one can.”

“I can try.”

Her smirk is half-hearted. “No one can protect anyone anymore, Jon.” When his thumb begins to ache, he realizes he’s spent the last few minutes rubbing circles at her hip with it, over the gentle fabric of her worn dress. As he lifts his eyes from the movement of his thumb, she shifts her face back towards his, their noses grazing one another. “Maybe I don’t want your protection. Maybe that’s not what I want from you.”

She tries to be bold by speaking the last few words so close they’re breathed out right onto his lips, but he can feel the tremble of her body against his, the slight quiver of her voice. “Sansa.”

“They’re not here anymore. They’re dead.” And oh, the quiver has broken into something even harsher. “The dead don’t care. The dead can’t ju--”

The words die in her mouth when he kisses her again. This time, it’s her hands in his hair, raking through the curls until her nails drag against his scalp roughly enough that he groans right into her.

It devolves quickly into him dragging her down the hall by her hips, her mouth brutal and her teeth cruel. By the time they make it through the bedroom door, she’s bitten down on his lower lip hard enough that he’ll know it’s going to bruise. Something tells him that she’s looking to leave her own marks tonight.

Jon drops to his knees in supplication. It’s been coming on six years since he last tasted her, and whatever was holding him back is nothing but vapor in his mind, a ghost. His hands skim up her skirt, the fabric dragging up the length of his forearms as he reaches for her underclothes.

But then Sansa goes completely stiff, the flesh that had been warm and pliable to the touch now rigid. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s the back of her thighs hitting the rise of the mattress behind her. She’s staring at the bed, at the faded red bed blanket spread across it like it’s blood, not cotton, a mild horror blanching her face.

“Sansa?” he asks gently, but her spine goes even straighter when his hand, falling off her body in concern, brushes over something so wrong his blood goes cold. She doesn’t answer his inquiry, but she does reach under her skirt to pull his hand away from her skin. Jon concedes his left hand only to replace it with the right, skimming across even more ruined skin on its way.

That pale thigh that she had flashed him under that tree, that he had touched in the dark shadows of their family kitchen while her parents slept upstairs is no longer unblemished. Under his hand, he can feel the raised marks, the kind you get from the blade of a knife.

(There are a few scattered scars just like it on his ribs from some of the less friendly men that cross the badlands, desperate enough to slice a man to bits for just the money he carries in his pocket.)

When he raises his eyes, she’s staring back defiantly, her mouth caught in a grim line.

“What happened to you?” Jon asks.

_Somewhere, she learned how to kiss._

The look on her face, the angry glow to her eyes lets him know he’s not getting it without a fight.

 

\--

 

He’s been gone near four days when he pulls his car down the dusty drive of the Stark Farm. Of course, Sansa’s waiting for him at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee resting in front of her.

She doesn’t ask about the blood staining his collar and shirt, about the torn state of his knuckles or the rough limp that makes the floorboards creak as he walks to the table and sits across from her. She doesn’t ask Jon what he did with her shotgun, though he sees the butt of the pistol he left behind for her on the kitchen table sitting next to the salt shaker, covered with a cloth to protect it from the dust storms that have hit again. Sansa doesn’t ask a thing, just stares at the evidence of violence splashed across him and shakes her head.

All these years later, all the pain between, and she’s still the most beautiful thing Jon’s ever seen. Even when she’s staring him down like she can’t decide whether she’s gonna slap him or kiss him. He’ll take either, gladly.

“You’re an idiot,” she says as she stands, pouring water into a bowl and reaching for the clean scraps of cloth. It reminds Jon of the way Littlefinger had hissed, _Don’t be stupid, boy. I can make you richer than you ever dreamed,_ his broken mouth dripping blood all over the floor of his fine brothel.

He’d thought about Sansa’s blood staining those same floors and pressed the gun against Baelish’s skull so hard he could hear the metal touch bone.

She urges him down into the seat she vacated, settling across from him, close enough that their legs slot like fingers.

Sansa’s gentle when she starts cleaning the splits in his knuckles, working the little bits of glass out from under the skin with delicate thumbs. Now it’s his blood all over her hands, seeping under her fingernails, staining her skin.

(He’s never been safe. He’s _never_ been safe from this.)

“Is he dead?” she asks without meeting his eye.

“All of them,” Jon answers. “They’re all dead.”

Her hands begin to shake.

 

\--

 

 _I know you,_ Littlefinger had said once he’d given up on all the other lies, the promises of money he knew wouldn’t land and the pleas for his life. _I had them go there for you, not her. But she was her own kind of prize, though not as promising as you._ He’d spit blood out and grinned, the smile of a prideful animal that knew it was about about to die. _Rhaegar’s little heir right under his very nose. A man who loses all his children grows desperate, will pay a lot for a little hope. He’s gonna come looking for yo-_

His brains had painted the floor a brilliant red.

Ramsay was exactly where Baelish said he was, his eyes wide with shock when Jon walked through his front door with a shotgun in his hands. Figures one of the last things to come out of Littlefinger’s mouth would be a truth.

 

\--

 

Jon wakes on the third night he’s back to a soft weight pressed against his chest. He knows who it is before he even opens his eyes, can smell the chestnut soap she uses to scrub her hair free of the dust that’s strangling everything. Jon can practically see the red of it behind his eyelids.

It’s just as lush when he opens his eyes, even in the dark of night.

She’d been in the field when he took to her bed, the small lit lantern dancing between the half-dead wheat as she went to check on the animals in the barn, to dampen the straw a bit to protect against fire.

This is the first time he’s seen Sansa in a bed since he came home.

This bed had belonged to her parents; he’d never been invited into it after nightmares the way Sansa or Robb or Rickon were, never tucked into it when he got sick like Arya had the summer she caught the spotted fever, or Bran after he fell into the dry water well out back and broke his back. It had always been a foreign land, something he glimpsed through the door when he passed by on his way to Robb’s room.

Now, he’s curled in it with Catelyn and Ned’s daughter, the girl he was never meant to touch, the one he tried so hard to stay away from. Her body spooned in front of his like two matching cups, his calf pressed between hers.

There are rogue curls of auburn hair at the nape of her neck, frizzy with the heat and moisture from his breath that disturb them every time he breathes. He touches the whisper-soft hair against his knuckles that have darkened into a solid, ugly purple bruise. That damage came toward the end; he’d beaten Ramsay’s face in first with his fists until he’d begun to feel the bone shift under the skin, the pain waking him out of the rage.

The butt of the shotgun had done the rest. When the house burned, there was nothing left of the face of Ramsay Bolton.

Curling his arm over her waist too slight for his liking, he lets sleep take him too.

 

\--

 

That night in the kitchen.

She was seventeen and sunburnt from spending hours with Lady out in the yard, mending shirts and changing the laundry line when her mother yelled from the house. The red blush of the burn creeped over the bridge of her nose and along the ridge of her shoulders, but there was another red spilling across her cheeks as she spread her legs ever so slightly, gave Jon enough room to close the space between their bodies.

Jon had kissed her there, in the light of the lantern sitting on the kitchen windowsill near Catelyn’s small trinkets from home. The first time Sansa had touched him out of anything more than familial duty, the first time beyond measured looks and teases that he knew his touch was wanted.

He’d put his hand between her legs in that low-light too, into the shorts that barely fit her after the last growth spurt but had to do seeing that money was tight and the land was growing dryer. It wasn’t dry between her legs though, warm and wet like he’d heard Theon and some of the ranch boys in town talk about women being when they were pleased.

Jon liked the idea of pleasing her, that he hadn’t even touched her, but she was already slick for him. She didn’t say anything when he rubbed at her with his fingertips, feeling her wet coat his fingers, just gave little moans bitten off by her teeth pressing down into her lip that let him know what she liked, her hips chasing the retreat of his hand when he’d twisted his wrist to press his hand to her proper.

After, when her breathing was still sawing in and out of her chest from the pleasure, he’d brought his wet hand to his mouth and dragged the fingers over his tongue to taste.

It had been her young, shocked gasp that had woken him up out of his stupor, the sound of their father’s boots - _her_ father’s boot - on the floor upstairs that made him stumble away from her wrecked body.

 

\--

 

“They shot all the dogs first,” Sansa said, her back resting against the doorframe of the kitchen, as far away from the bed tucked away in her parents’ bedroom as she could get. “Then they asked Rickon where you were, when they didn’t believe I was telling the truth. They made him lay facedown on the floor and tell them where you were. When he said he didn’t know, they shot him in the back. Like he was one of the dogs, too.”

Jon felt his entire body start to shake.

_Those Targaryens. Fire and Blood. They’re built for rage and madness._

It wasn’t until Sansa said quietly, “You know _The Mockingbird_ , out on the King’s Road?” that Jon reached for the shotgun.

 

\--

 

Arya disappears with the boy she’s been spending time with, the one that works Davos’s ranch without complaint though if he’d been trueborn, the land would have been his. Jon isn’t quite sure he approves of Gendry - he’s a rough boy, good-natured but not much to offer a girl, and Jon feels the weight of Ned’s responsibility to see Arya settled resting on his back. But Arya’s made her wishes clear - _I don’t need you watching out for me, you hear? I’m not some girl, I get to decide who I let between my legs_ \- and he’s decided to respect them as long as the boy doesn’t step out of line.

In truth, Gendry’s more of a stable influence on her than any of them, like an anchor keeping her from drifting away entirely.

But then they both disappear, Davos asking after Gendry’s stay at the Stark house when they run into each other in town. Jon smiles, says they’ll be returning his hand shortly, that Gendry’s been good help clearing the brush near the back of the property to possibly lend out as pasture space even though they both know that the land is bone dry without a blade of grass to it.

Bran worries himself sick that Arya’ll go missing for another year, but Sansa is calm.

“She’ll be back,” Sansa says, stealing one of Jon’s cigarettes and lighting it on the lantern, like the sum of all knowledge is resting in her pretty little head.

That night, Sansa climbs on top of him in the bed. She peels the light gown she wears to sleep off her body and lets him see her, lets him touch the scars and freckles he’s never seen before, hidden by clothes. She tries to get him in her, her pleading desperate and thready as she reaches between them for his cock, but he bats her hand away, rolls them over so she can take his fingers instead.

( _Please, please,_ she whimpers, the only time she’s not steel-hard is when he’s between her thighs, driving the ghosts of her parents and her brothers out of her, the memory of whatever happened in the wall of that brothel he burned to the fucking ground.

 _Those Targaryens. Fire and Blood._ )

In the morning, she’s gone, just the smell of her in the bed and on his fingers.

A week later, Arya reappears. There are no answers for where she’s been and what she’s been doing, not that Jon is foolish enough to ask. She bears no wounds, no outward signs of violence, so he leaves her be when she jogs up the stairs to the house, walking to her bedroom like she’d been gone a few hours instead of days. From the corner of the hallway, the hot sun beating down into the windows, Jon watches her shove a small notebook under her thin mattress.

It takes another few days for news to spread into town.

The entire Frey family slaughtered at Walder’s ranch at the edge of the badlands, where the three rivers fork east into rapids. A few of them had lived only long enough to make it to the river, enough blood spilled into it that it turned the white water nearly red.

 

\--

 

The Lannisters burn the wells.

(Not Lannister men, but paid by Lannister coin all the same.)

Jon wakes to a sky full of black smoke, a different shade of terrifying than the giant dust storms that blot out the sun every few weeks. Arya joins him on the porch, handing him a small glass of what smells like whiskey even though it’s barely past eight in the morning. She’s squinting into the distance, frowning.

“That’s not good,” she says,

“No, it not,” Jon replies.

He gets his papers the next day when he shows up for his shift. The entire crew is given orders to report to Harrenhal, out near the border, to start on one of the newer wells there.

“You gonna say goodbye before you leave this time?” Sansa asks when he gets home, still early in the afternoon. Her eyes are focused on the papers still clutched in his hand.

Jon shakes his head. “Not leaving. We’ll figure it out.”

Sansa peers up at him like she doesn’t quite believe him, but still climbs into the bed that night, brings his hand up between her scarred thighs and takes her pleasure from him. Her knees are bent and shivering with her peak when he pushes down the bed, shoving his shoulders between them, a strangled, _Jon!,_ hissed so as to not wake Bran before he sets his mouth to her.

No, he’s not leaving.

But then Tywin Lannister’s shithead grandson Joffrey is found strung up on the near-dry water tower, drowned in oil. They find his gut is bloated with how much he was forced to drink, his mouth gaping wide in a silent scream when he’s spotted at dawn. Jon doesn’t know much about Joffrey more than him turning his eye to Sansa once upon a time, then dropping her soundly when she’d refused to part her legs for him. Left her with a good set of bruises to match.

(The day Arya told him that little piece of Sansa’s time without him, it had taken him nearly two miles and a destroyed shovel to work down his rage.)

Jon only wishes he could have forced the oil down his throat himself. Good riddance.

Three weeks later, twenty miles of the railway Targaryen Ltd. was laying near Casterly Rock is torn straight out of the ground, another fifty damaged so badly the papers are saying it’ll need to be torn out anyway to be reset. It’s the same week Jaime Lannister is held down in his office and has his hand cut off. The same papers call them bandits, thieves, but not a single dollar is taken, not one bar of gold.

The bandits mail Tywin his son’s hand in a box lined with Lannister pay slips.

Lannister Savings & Loan sends a notice of foreclosure on the Stark Property at the end of the month. _Failure to pay outstanding dues,_ it says in underlined type, and Jon can taste the smug satisfaction in the Lannisters taking the last of what the Starks own.

War is coming.

 

\--

 

 _I heard you Targaryens like to bed your own_ , Ramsay had said, his voice threaded with enough pain that it nearly covered the condescension. _Though if I had a sister who looked like that, I’d fuc-_

He’d planned to set the house on fire with Ramsay still alive inside - so he’d burn, so he’d suffer. But when Jon struck the match outside, the smell of gasoline thick in the air, Ramsay was already dead.

 

\--

 

He’s sitting on the porch with Sansa when they come.

The foreclosure notice from the Lannisters had given them thirty days to vacate the property. It’s only been eight, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Lannisters have paid the law to run out people before their due.

There’s a car coming up the long, dusty drive. When it gets closer, Jon can see it’s far nicer than anything a farmer could afford in these parts, shined up enough that even through the dust, the metal gleams brightly in the sun. Lawmen out this way drive beaten trucks with faded stars on them built to handle the sand and dust, not black cars that belong in cities.

Sansa’s fist curls into the shirt over his side as they both see it.

A large T-shaped dragon etched on the door.

_Those Targaryens._


End file.
